CELEBRITIES

Chasen’s was a glamorous world – “Celebrity chefs” will never replace stylish hosts and personalities such as Dave Chasen or Vincent Sardi or Mike Romanoff. The “chefs” were in the kitchen. Not greeting you at the front door! Now the once famous eatery is a supermarket catering to the newly rich and what Dave Chasen would call the déclassé. No ... Read More »

In July 1956, the SS Andrea Doria sank on the last night of its voyage from Italy to New York City. With over 1,134 passengers aboard, including Hollywood movie stars Ruth Roman and Betsy Drake, barely 100 short of her passenger capacity of 1,241. There were 190 first class passengers, 267 cabin class passengers and 677 tourist class passengers, which ... Read More »

Judy Garland is on the passenger list and its the Captain’s Dinner Night on the SS United States… And it is the one night that Judy Garland left her stateroom. Pictured: Sid Luff and his wife Judy Garland with a friend John Carlyle at right. 1956 1st Class Dining Room – the SS UNITED STATES… Cunard Line Passenger Lists Cruise History: ... Read More »

David Bowie (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016), who starred in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, had a long-standing fear of flying. Bowie sailed aboard Cunard’s QE 2, the Italian Line’s Leonardo da Vinci, P&O-Orient Line’s Oronsay and Canberra along with many other ships. So while other superstars would take the Concorde or private jets to ... Read More »

When the Fox Theater was built in 1929, it seemed as if there weren’t enough adjectives to describe the movie theater’s magnificence. The San Francisco Chronicle called the opening “a spectacle of such beauty and magnitude that it seemed rather a fancy of one’s mind rather than the inaugural night of another commercial enterprise.” OPENING NIGHT But the life of ... Read More »

The streamliner California Zephyr was featured in Columbia Pictures 1952 thriller SUDDEN FEAR starring Joan Crawford and Jack Palance. Included were exterior and interior scenes aboard the train. Grand Central Station and the Oakland Mole were highlighted where Crawford respectively boards and disembarks to head across the bay to San Francisco by ferry boat. After playwright and wealthy heiress, Myra ... Read More »

Besides the fabulous Italian ocean liner S.S. REX launched in 1931, there was another S.S. REX. The gambling ship off the coast of California in the 1930s and 1940s. The far lesser (but profitable)REX was operated as a gambling ship off Los Angeles by Anthony Cornero. Gary Grant made a movie in the early 1930s based on the gambling boats. ... Read More »

The steel-hulled, diesel-powered yacht Aras was laid down on March 19, 1930, by the Bath Iron Works; launched on December 8, 1930; and delivered to wood-pulp magnate Hugh J. Chisholm on January 15, 1931. The Aras, a long graceful steel ship, was sold in April 1941 to the US Navy for use as a patrol gunboat and re-christened it USS Williamsburg. ... Read More »

In the 1957 musical film Pal Joey, Frank Sinatra gets off a Southern Pacific train and then heads across the bay to San Francisco aboard one of the SP Ferry Boats. Oakland Long Wharf was the western terminus of the Southern Pacific Railroad. From there, ferries carried both commuters and long-distance passengers between the Long Wharf and San Francisco. FRANK ... Read More »

North Carolina School of the Arts’ “OKLAHOMA!” Recreation of the 1943 original production of the most produced American in history proved that the UNC had the hand on presenting great theater. National known conductor John Mauceri served as musical director and artistic supervisor of the stage production. Oklahoma! – Looking back… By the early 1940s, Rodgers and Hammerstein were each ... Read More »

In December 1934, the refurbished Earl Carroll Theatre located on the south-east corner of 7th Ave and 50th Street, New York City, opened as the French Casino. This glittering supper club was described by Fortune magazine as ‘a vast scarlet and silver restaurant which, in terraced rows of tables, seats fifteen hundred people without any crowding.’ For a short three ... Read More »

The Paramount Theatre opened in January 1923 as Grauman’s Metropolitan Theatre. It was the second largest movie palace in California, San Francisco’s fabulous Fox Theatre was the first. Both were demolished in the 1960s. Elvis Presley appeared in person at the Paramount in the 1950s. Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood were featured on the gigantic screen in “The Girl I ... Read More »

First as the trans-Pacific record holder liner, then serving during World War 2, followed by being renamed the Empress of Scotland on the trans-Atlantic run and then finally sailing under the German flag. It was ironic, the allied ship used during WW 2 to fight the Nazis, was sold to Hamburg America Line and rebuilt as the Hanseatic for cruise ... Read More »

“Elvis who?” Photographer Alfred Wertheimer recalls uttering that very question in early 1956. A publicist from RCA Victor Records had contacted him, asking if he was available to photograph a young singer named Elvis Presley. “I’d never heard of the man,” Wertheimer told TIME Magazine in an article 40 years later. “He didn’t have a gold record yet.” (By the ... Read More »

Star of Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO, Janet Leigh is ready to board the famous SUPER CHIEF and Virginia Leith, star of A KISS BEFORE DYING shows us the all-Pullman train during the 1950s in a promotional film. Even the characters from TV’s MAD MEN may have been aboard the train all through the 1960s. A lot of executives would take the ... Read More »